'Narayan,' writes John Updike in the introduction to a new edition of the great Indian writer's memoir My Days (Picador, £6.99), 'was one of a vanishing breed - the writer as citizen.' It's an interesting point and one which, as Updike unfolds it, raises a multitude of good questions about what might be called the Condition of Fiction question.

'What a wealth of material becomes accessible to a writer who can so simply proclaim a sense of community!' exclaims Updike, nostalgically investing Narayan's Mysore [the Malgudi of his novels] with the attributes so strikingly absent from most American and English writers' habitual milieu. He goes on to utter a lament for his profession that will strike a chord with any reader who has recently been disappointed by serious contemporary fiction.

'We have writers willing to be mayor but not excited to be citizens. We have writers as confessors, shackled to their personal lives, and writers as researchers, hanging their sheets of information from a bloodless storyline. But of writers immersed in their material, and enabled to draw tales from a community of neighbours, Faulkner was our last great example.'

Substitute, say, Thomas Hardy for William Faulkner, and you have a typically acute Updike analysis of the state we're in, creatively speaking.

This appetite for tales that arise from the hopes and dreams, fears and loves to be found in everyday English or American community life is a reminder to the metropolitan writer that postmodern innovation only goes so far.

One of the most instructive sets of favourable reviews in recent weeks has been the reception accorded to Melvyn Bragg's A Son of War (Hodder, £8.99). I'm not going to do his publisher's work for him and quote from Bragg's coverage but in summary, on high or low, from left or right, the critics have chorused in a harmony ranging from cordial to enthusiastic to downright hyperbolic.

A Son of War is not this year's most sophisticated new novel, and it contains passages that will have some smart readers raising the old eyebrow, but it 'proclaims a sense of community' in spades. It also addresses a universal and timeless theme - a man coming home from the wars to his family - to which audiences since Homer have unfailingly responded well.

You can, if you like, say that Bragg is 'traditional' or 'provincial', even 'middlebrow' (though I don't think he'd lose much sleep over such epithets) but that's to overlook the vital and uncommon connection he - and, in his own way, R.K. Narayan - is making between the common reader and common experience.

The writer who writes with 'a sense of community' engages the heart as well as the mind. As the American novelist Roxana Robinson put it the other day in the New York Times, 'the terrestrial world is warming up [and] the literary world is cooling down... an icy chill has crept across the writer's landscape.'

So the novels that attract the most attention are the novels that, positively bristling with bravura displays of technical virtuosity, remain at heart quite bereft of feeling.

This line of argument, of course can quickly degenerate into a reactionary hymn of praise for the nineteenth-century novel, for a good tale well told, characters you can believe in, sentences with subjects, verbs and objects blah blah.

But if we parse the logic of Updike's observation, many contemporary novelists are, indeed, only too profoundly detached from 'a community of neighbours', often from no fault of their own.

Typically, a successful young novelist today, someone who has published, say, two or three well-received novels, becomes quickly shackled to a literary treadmill: campus readings, bookshop appearances, Arts Council trips to Bruges or Barcelona, dinners with booksellers, launch parties, press interviews, overseas publicity tours promoting translated editions, and so on.

Deracinated from their creative hinterland, leading lives that have nothing to do with a 'community of neighbours', these professional writers become better and better at conducting their lives as 'writers', less and less in touch with the world that sparked their imagination in the first place. Their work, meanwhile, becomes thinner and thinner, more and more calculated to appeal to that narrow and treacherous audience of critics, booksellers, publicists and partygoers which seems to constitute their basic readership.

This is, of course, a far cry from the world of William Faulkner honoured by Mr Updike in his exemplary celebration of the life and world of R.K. Narayan, one of my favourite writers. Faulkner (and Narayan) have a lot to teach us in other ways, too. Narayan lived and finally died among the people of Mysore, and it was Faulkner who once observed that real writing was to do with 'the human heart in conflict with itself'.